Adam Japko on Zagging

WineZag is a place to share information that keeps wine fun, simple, and rewarding.Whether you buy $10 bottles on Friday nights or regularly stuff your cellar with collectibles to crack open ’61 Bordeaux with pizza on Tuesdays, wine is nothing if not a source of sensual pleasure.The tremendous amount of wine on retail shelves should not create uncertainty and restaurant wine menus don’t need to feel like intimidating lists that fail to inform your selection. Snagging a bottle that offers maximum pleasure for sharing with friends and family is immensely rewarding and ought to be simple.

Over the past twenty years wine prices and the sheer number of wines have soared while consistency in derived pleasure did not track along the same growth curve. That is a broad, but often true, generalization during an era of accusation which has winemakers making fewer “flawed” wines, but ones that are less energetic in their unique expression. The criticism that wines are being fashioned for the personal tastes of influential wine critics sticks to a number of producers.Some say the spread between price and quality are intricacies of supply and demand at work, others point to the cost of new acreage, winemakers bemoan the expense of replanting after vineyards fall prey to deadly disease, exporters reference the weakened US Dollar, and then there are claims that the wine press’ 90+ point scores of praise causes prices to unnaturally escalate.Most definitely, rising prices and trophy wine labels brought new collectors from developed and emerging wine markets into the game, viewing wine as an investment grade commodity or a name brand label game. They guzzled and hoarded cases for immediate social standing and future financial gain.Whatever reason you want to accept, like so much else over the past twenty years, things just got out of hand.

Wine is too simple a pleasure to let intimidation factors and rising prices spoil its intended place in our lives. Wine is a lubricant for human connection that holds no bias.Over the past twenty years I have attempted to stay current in my knowledge through tastings and readings, always keeping things real and staying in touch with the reasons I love wine, never to succumb to the social and market forces that could consolidate the best stuff with only a handful of “Brahmans of Wine.” It takes very little time and knowledge to learn how to benefit from“zagging” when everyone else is “zigging” through the maze of fine wine.I hope you will join me on that journey.